


Issues

by NovaStars42



Series: The Kids Aren't Alright [22]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cancer, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Gen, Healing, Humanstuck, Karkat Needs a Hug, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Loss of Parent(s), Love, Mentions of Cancer, Nepeta is not good at this but shes trying, New Family, Sibling Bonding, Understanding, is that a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 09:25:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10487562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NovaStars42/pseuds/NovaStars42
Summary: After waiting half the summer, Karkat receives a package in the mail. Via the pictures inside, he meets his mother for the first time.Occurs after "Not Listening" and "Night Changes" but could be read alone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! Happy Anniversary to this little fic project! 
> 
> I've had a lot of fun with this, and I hope I still keep having fun with it. For the anniversary I kicked around another Latuna chapter, but actually after the Jane/Gamzee fic the Karkat chapter has the most comments, and still needed resolved. Here it is! -throws confetti- Here's to Karkat's (perfectly understandable) mommy issues.  
> I named the first fic in this succession "My Youth Is Yours" and I have actually since seen Troye Sivan in concert!! He's great guys. 
> 
> Ths fic was named for the new Julia Michaels song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biNFM2up81c&list=PLwBvGRZ4qTdnLZHpBumYJM2m92t14U8x6&index=22

The mailman came and went all summer. It was about as uneventful as bingo in a room full of goldfish. He came and went every day without saying a word, just shoved my dad’s junk mail in the box and continued on to the next. But today was different. Today he pulled his freshly washed mail truck into my driveway and got out.

I’d been watching him since the fourth of July. I had his schedule down better than my timestables. I knew when he got out of the truck he either the mailbox was either full, or he had a package. I’d gotten our mail every day, so I knew the box wasn’t full. I raced to greet him at our front door.

“Here’s your mail,” he smiled, holding out a package with all of the regular stuff resting on top.

“Thank you!” I replied hastily, taking the box just as quick.

The mailman turned and left without any more fanfare, and I was thankful for that. I turned, slamming the door dashing to the kitchen to dump everything on the counter. I didn’t care about anything else in the pile of mail, I’d been waiting for this box for two weeks and now it was finally in my hands. I paused just a moment to look it over.

It was just a simple box. Small, white, with the USPS logo on it. The mailing address was to me. I ran my fingers over the letters, feeling the bumps where my uncle had pressed his pen into the cardboard.

 

_ To: Karkat Vantas _

 

_ From: Jack Noir _

 

I’d almost forgotten my Uncle’s real name wasn’t Slick. Slick was a nickname my mom gave him, he’d told me when I was a kid. We didn’t see him much. A few phone calls a year. He tried to stay in touch, but my dad made it hard for him.

He’d been kind enough to send me his memories, though.

I couldn’t wait anymore, I decided. I could look at the bid again later, I reasoned as I reached into our junk drawer to pull out the scissors. I felt like my hands should have been trembling as I cut through the packaging tape, but they were steady. I took one last deep breath before I pulled the cardboard flaps back.

I expected there to be pictures, maybe in frames, maybe old polaroids, maybe even something that used to be hers. Anything physical, anything to do with her, but no. Inside there was a CD, a bag of pre-buttered, unpopped popcorn and an envelope labeled “OPEN ME FIRST.”

So I did.

I felt like I should have been careful with these items, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I ripped open the envelope with vigor, gritting my teeth as I tore the top fold off of it with my nail. I snatched the faded notebook paper out of the envelope and unfolded it as fast as I could.

 

_ Dear Karkat, _

 

_ Hey kid! How are you? I haven’t seen you in so long except on Kankri’s Facebook pictures. Send me some recent ones when you get this, will ya? _

_ Anyway, I’m sure you're wondering about the pictures, and how there aren’t any. I put them all on the DVD in the box. There were too many pictures, too much stuff I wanted to show you, the box was gonna cost like fifty bucks to send! But I got more on the DVD than I ever wanted to send. _

_ Pop the corn and pop in the movie. Love you kid. _

 

_ Enjoy _

_ Uncle Slick _

 

I picked up the bag of popcorn and looked it over for just a second. Then I popped the plastic and opened it. I turned around and threw it in the microwave. The two minutes it took to pop it were enough to give me time to cool down. I hadn’t even noticed my hands were sweating until they slipped off the microwave buttons.

Deep breathes. Take deep breathes. Calm down.

Jesus Christ the kid everyone went to ask for advice from couldn’t even take his own.

Past Karkat was such a fucking idiot for thinking this was a good idea. This was a bad idea. I should have just fucking suppressed my emotions like an adult and dealt with my mommy issues alone.

I thought about Dave for a second. Between the two of us, we didn’t have a stable parent, but he came here because it was still better than what he had. I didn’t want him around right now, I didn’t want him to see me so nervous. So visibly shaken.

My chest felt tight, and standing on my legs felt like pins and needles. I didn’t know what to expect but I knew it couldn’t be good. Nothing about cancer was ever good.

The beep of the microwave made me jump. Huffing, I grabbed a bowl out of my cabinet and poured the now popped corn in it. I didn’t salt it, just picked up my bowl and my box and went to the living room.

Kankri was gone today, hanging out with two new friends or something. My dad was at work, and he was going out with Disciple later. I’d have the house to myself for the foreseeable future.

I laid the box down on the couch and picked up the remote. I switched the television to the auxiliary channel and went to the DVD player. I didn’t think too much about it as I placed the CD in the tray. I went through the motions mechanically.

I sat down as the player read the disc, and suddenly the no signal screen flipped over to the black loading screen. This wasn’t like a movie, it didn’t have a home screen or music, it just went right to the pictures.

I wished there would have been more delay, but the first photo slapped me in the face like a sharp hand.

Just like that there she was. Labeled on the photo was the year nineteen seventy-six. It was yellowed, with poor coloration, but their faces were bright and happy. There was a woman I recognized as my grandmother, and then two children. A boy and a girl, both just babies. My uncle and my mother.

The screen changed moments later, another picture of her when she was young, only about five or six, with a big orange cat cradled in her arms. It had a bonnet on, and dolls all around her, with a baby bed, made up next to them.

They moved when she was still a kid, and all of the next photos were taken in their new house. There were so many pictures of her when she was young, labeled with years and months, exact dates of life events. Photos yellowed with time, but still preserving the memory. Some were smaller than others, pixelated by the computer as it was forced to stretch to fit the screen.

There were pictures of her in middle school, in eighties bell bottoms and big rimmed glasses.

Pictures of her with friends I didn’t recognize. Some stayed through the years, some didn’t. I thought maybe one of the girls had been Vriska’s mother, but I wasn’t sure. There were pictures of her birthdays, with big numbered candles stuck on the cake.

A series of photos ticked by, labeled nineteen-eighty nine were taken at the state science fair, according to a banner in the background. She stood in front of a science board. It was hard to tell what color because of some spots that were caused by the camera. There was a second photo of her in goggles, standing over some electrical circuit. The final photo was of her smiling face, holding a blue ribbon that was the size of her head. She looked so happy, grinning as big and bright as she could. I tried to burn that photo into my memory.

She graduated when she was eighteen in nineteen ninety-two. The fashion was starting to change now, and her senior pictures were taken in the woods in autumn. She was wearing a college sweater, one where I knew for a fact she’d gone to. These photos were better quality, kept away from the light so as not to fade them. The colors of the leaves were vibrant, and so was the red of her hair. I’d always thought it was browner. She looked flawless, down to the makeup covering her pimples.

She was so beautiful. I loved her the way only nostalgia could allow. Her hair was long and straight, and her eyes were the same brown as mine too. We had the same eye color. That made my heart skip a beat.

There were several pictures of her at her graduation, in her cap and gown, and in the very last photo, I recognized my dad nearby.

From there the photos got more sparse. She got older and my dad was more frequently in them.

In nineteen ninety-five, they got married. I must have watched wedding photos flash by for twenty minutes. All the rest of my family was in the photos, sure, but I could tell my uncle was careful to pick the ones that highlighted her.

Her dress was more of a pearl color than white. The skirt was made of just a few plain ruffles, but the sleeves were long and poofy, like some kind of Disney princess. I grinned, thinking about her as Cinderella.

Stella Noir became Stella Vantas on May fifth, nineteen ninety-five. By May sixth, there were photos of their honeymoon. They’d gone camping with what looked like a bunch of their friends. There were less and less high school friends left in these photos, but now I was sure that was Vriska’s mother. She stuck around.

I hadn’t see Disciple in any of these photos. Not yet anyway. She appeared in nineteen ninety-six, twenty years ago in a picture of my parents standing in front of our house as it was still being built. Disciple was in it, and so was Psiionic Captor and Highblood Makara, our neighbors.

Sollux’s dad was giving the camera a double peace sign and what? Did he use to have long hair? Oh, Sollux was gonna love to see this. And Gamzee’s dad! Holy shit the guy used to be ripped. Seriously, like rip his shirt if he flexed ripped. This was so surreal. Gamzee’s crazy mother was standing next to him, and it was hard to tell her apart from how she looked down. Gamzee was a mess but that woman was a land mine.

There were pictures of my parents now, one or the other now they lived alone. There was a few of my mom holding a blonde puppy, rocking it like she had the cat fifteen years earlier. I was too little to remember it much about that dog, like what happened to it, but I did know it would outlive her.

Kankri was born in nineteen ninety-nine. There were pictures of her at the hospital, and then pictures of her at home, letting her pet meet her son. Kankri was in every picture after that, being held while he fussed or drank a bottle.

The new millennium passed later that year, and there was a single picture of just her looking nervous with those stupid two thousand glasses on with eyeholes in the zeros. Didn’t everyone think the computers were all going to explode or something?

The very next photo skipped a whole year and wound up in two thousand one. She wasn’t looking so good in this photo as she hugged my uncle Slick, very heavily pregnant with me.

She looked worse in the photo of her in the hospital, holding baby me in her arms. She looked so tired, more than she had in the picture with Kankri, with sweat clung to her forehead and bags under her eyes. My uncle had said they’d found the cancer when she had me.

It was hard to watch her deteriorate. There were only two more pictures of her after that one. One of her holding me and Kankri, looking too thin. Her clothes hung off of her. The blonde dog was in the background, having lost its youthful look.

The last one was a photo of her in what I recognized as our living room, laying in a hospital bed without hair. She was smiling still, and holding me with a newly five-year-old Kankri by her side. She didn’t see my third birthday.

I was crying all of a sudden. Not crying, sobbing. Ugly sobbing that made my headache and my jaw numb.

I didn’t know she’d lived that long. She died in two thousand three. Two thousand three. Thirteen years ago, that was all. She’d lived only two years after I was born.

It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t fair. She was so pretty, and her smile was so pretty, and she was so- she was so… perfect. Why couldn’t she still be here?

I wanted to tell her that I loved her.

The photo cut off suddenly and the screen was black for only a moment, humming before static overtook the speakers and a video started.

She was still laying down in the hospital bed, a hat on and a thick red sweater. There was a lot of commotion, the dog barking and my dad talking in the background.

“Snowman, how you holdin’ up?” My uncle Slick asked from behind the camera.

“Bout as well as I can,” she rolled her eyes, speaking in the same thick Brooklyn accent as my uncle.

“Yeah,” my uncle agreed vaguely, “so uh, did ya’ have anything ya’ wanted to say to the camera?”

“Yeah, I want you ta’ get that friggin’ thing outta my face!” She hissed.

“No, for real,” he insisted. My mother's expression softened. I was crying so hard, but I wanted to hear what she had to say. I tried to quiet myself down as best I could.

“Well,” she huffed, “I don’t exactly know who you’re planning on showing this to. But. I guess um,” she paused, biting her lip, “I’d tell everybody that I’m okay. And that I’m not sorry this happened. I wouldn’t have lived my life any other way.”

“That all?” My uncle asked.

“No,” my mom said. “I love you, Jack. And I love my kids and my husband. I love Mindfang, and Disciple even. I love everybody.”

She grinned, looking up at the camera.

“I love you too, Stella,” my uncle said and the camera shifted to the floor before it shut off. The screen went blank after that, and with shaking hands, I turned the tv off.

Holy shit she said she loved me.

I wished I hadn’t heard that, but at the same time, I don’t think I could have lived another minute without. My chest ached, both from being crumbled in on myself and from crying. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and drew my knees up to my chest and let everything out.

I loved her, I missed her. She was such a strong woman, and holy fuck I loved her so much. I couldn’t believe I’d heard her say she loved me with my own ears.

“Karkat?” Nepeta Leijon’s voice cut through my house. I’d left the back door unlocked in case Dave needed to get away from his house and Nepeta had apparently let herself in.

“Oh my god are you okay?” She asked, standing in my hallway.

“ ’m fine,” I muttered.

“Uhh, no?” She disagreed. “My mom wanted me to bring you over for lunch. She got off work early, but I don’t think you’re going anywhere like that. What’s wrong?”

I tossed the box to her that contained the letter. I hurried my face in my hands as the paper rustled and she read the note. There wasn’t much on it for her to draw a conclusion from.

“Holy crap,” she said. “Is this, like, about your dad? Did somebody die?”

She looked worried, holding my letter gingerly. She wasn’t leaving like I expected her to. If that were me I would have turned tail and ran unless it was Dave or John or somebody important. I needed to get my shit together. I couldn’t talk to me friend, no, wait, my sister while I was crying. My sinuses were starting to burn anyway. I took a few deep, gasping breaths and scrubbed my eyes hard, trying to push the tears away.

“Not recently,” I muttered. My chest still ached and I lost control for just a second before I shoved the tears back down with sniffles.

“What?” She asked, coming closer.

“Nobody's died recently,” I said a little louder and a little clearer.

“What happened?” She came closer still. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

I really didn’t want to tell her. I did anyway.

“My uncle sent me a video of pictures of my mom.”

“Oh!” Her face lit up with realization. She came even closer, until she was almost on top of me before she sat down on the edge of the couch and placed a hand on my knee.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head no. This time I didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry, Karkat,” she said, “do you maybe want to get your mind off of it for a while? My mom is making tuna fish.”

I didn’t want to move. I felt tired, emotionally exhausted. I just wanted to lay down and go to sleep. Nepeta… she cared I thought. Not like a friend and not like a sibling. Something in between but just as genuine. I wanted to tell her to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to push her away.

“Yeah,” I croaked. I cleared my throat right after.

“Okay,” She smiled and took my hand, helping me up off of the sofa. Her fingers curled around mine firmly, and her palm was warm. I let her lead me outside into the hot mid-day sun.

“Hey, Nepeta. After we eat, do you wanna take a picture with me?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The end of this chapter was supposed to signify moving on, and his acceptance of Nepeta and Disciple. 
> 
>  
> 
> The sun still shines kids.


End file.
